Monday, 17 June 2013

The History of Internet Movie Marketing

I'm currently writing one of the last chapters of my book on The Blair Witch Project for the Auteur Devil's Advocate series and I'm trying to find out a bit about the history of movie marketing using the internet as a tool. Everybody knows about the effectiveness of the website that was made to promote The Blair Witch Project but I'm curious about how ground breaking it actually was.

I'm finding it pretty hard to find out much about the history of internet movie marketing so I've put a few tweets out to see if anyone can help. Here are the tweets. This is, by the way, one of the many reasons I love Twitter. There are so many movie buffs out there and their knowledge, passion and desire to communicate astounds me. I'm just waiting for the day when I run out of movie buffs to follow but I hope that never happens.

Anyone know anything about the history of movie marketing on the internet?
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) June 17, 2013

Anyone know the first film to have a promotional website?
— Pete Turner (@ilovethatfilm) June 17, 2013

And as usual with the power of the internet, I got a response to one of these question almost immediately. How good is that? Love Twitter. Love the internet. Very grateful to @beckygracelea for the information. I recommend you go follow her for being awesome!

So Stargate eh? Freaky that I've just finished writing a Roland Emmerich retrospective for Filmoria too (to be published next week). You'd have thought I might have stumbled across this little nugget of information. Here is the proof that @beckygracelea was right:

So now my other questions still stand, what happened next, when did it become commonplace? Was Blair Witch really the one that made movie makers see the power of the internet as a marketing tool? Any help would be extremely generous and much appreciated!